Current
Issue
Fall 2026 / Volume 13.1
Simeon Berry
—
My mother chose not the logic problems of soft-boy Jesus
but the Old Testament when she read to us every night, the arbitrary incidents where God was always fucking pissed at some kingly idiot and his extra oxen, or the other rinky-dink nation with truly-disappointing real estate and wheat-based problems.
The previous year I’d told her my dream where we moved to a red, two-story, salt box house by the sea with secret passages, and then we did. Our first night there, she recounted how Saul convinces a female necromancer from Endor to summon his former adviser Samuel from Sheol, which is not so much a realm as it is simply a pit where your corpse happens to be.
Samuel is rip-shit and says Saul no longer gets good intel from the Lord because he didn’t execudest that schmuck Amalek. And so Saul will bite it tomorrow. Which he does, falling on his sword to spite the winning Philistines. Proving that intuitive information is no fun to carry around, much like the last word.
Around this time, my mother started sleeping with someone armed, who specialized in micro-transactions with people who had very well-defined and immediate needs, while my father—later to be dubbed a smooth talker by the judge in the divorce decree—worked the graveyard shift, developing industrial photography.
And I built a secret beige city inside my dresser with computer punch cards, which everyone marveled at as much for its intricacy as the fact that I hadn’t said a word about its dusty labyrinth of abandoned data, failing to note the only thing missing: a monster to make its recursive question necessary.
I dreamed about the unlikely house the year before
right down to the two-story capillary red of the clapboards and the secret passages that let you emerge from closets between bedrooms. As if we were destined to wander in nightgowns, holding five flames underneath greasy oil portraits of uneasy shipping magnates.
On my nightstand, a book of Greek myths like a manual for sexual misconduct, with pen and ink drawings where everyone’s nipples were practically sentient. I read with grim satisfaction how their bad decisions led to second careers as creaking trees and sad animals, even as my legs lit up with a constellation of fleas from the previous renter’s past-tense Pomeranians.
My mother’s burned toast made the kitchen acrid as a manifesto, while my father worked from midnight til eight in the darkroom on the other side of town, enlarging photos like a chemical actor in a black box play.
My mother dragged her late night phone calls to the closet like she was going in there to strangle the receiver, like she was answering a typewriter in the rain from a noir novel, her eyes wide and hands blurred, the way they seemed to when she wrote a check for the groceries, and I winced in the car on the way home at the sirens that must have been coming for us, because there was no way you could pay with paper.
Simeon Berry won the National Poetry Series for Ampersand Revisited (Fence Books) and Monograph (University of Georgia Press). He has been an Associate Editor for Ploughshares and won a Massachusetts Cultural Council Individual Artist Grant.
